Sima Qian
Sima Qian wrote the Shiji, the founding work of Chinese historiography, and completed it after being castrated rather than abandon it. Born around 145 BC in Longmen, he was the son of Sima Tan, the Grand Historian at the Han court, an office concerned with astronomy, the calendar and records. He travelled extensively in his twenties, visiting the sites of events he would later describe and collecting local traditions, then entered court service and succeeded his father in 108 BC. His father had begun a comprehensive history and, on his deathbed, made him promise to finish it. In 99 BC the general Li Ling, having fought a hopeless action against overwhelming Xiongnu forces, surrendered. Sima Qian was the only person at court to speak in his defence, arguing that he had fought well and had probably surrendered intending to return. Emperor Wu took this as an implicit criticism of his brother-in-law's failed campaign and condemned Sima Qian to death. The sentence could be commuted by payment of a fine he could not afford or by castration. Suicide was the expected choice for a man of his rank. He chose the mutilation and the disgrace, and wrote afterwards that he endured it because the book was not finished. The Shiji covers some two and a half thousand years to his own time, in 130 chapters. Its structure — annals, chronological tables, treatises on subjects such as ritual, music and economics, hereditary houses, and biographies — was copied by every subsequent dynastic history for two millennia. He included merchants, assassins and jesters alongside emperors, and judged his subjects openly, including the reigning dynasty. He died around 86 BC.
- Lived: 145 BCE – 86 BCE
- Nationality: Chinese
- Roles: historian
